“NASA has kicked off its efforts to return to the Moon by asking the commercial space industry to help the agency land scientific payloads on the surface of the Moon. By using commercial services, NASA hopes to lower the cost of studying the Moon and getting astronauts back to the lunar surface by the mid-2020s.”

Who needs NASA to study the moon?

Who needs NASA to get astronauts back onto the lunar surface?

Why wouldn’t private organizations cut the cost of NASA returning to the moon to zero and just do it themselves?

Why wouldn’t private organizations cut the cost of NASA returning to the moon to zero and just do it themselves?

They are proposing public private partnerships where NASA is just a customer and the partners retain control over their products to market how they choose. This is great but how many will be able to find customers other than NASA? Very excited to see how this plays out.

Looks like Bridenstein is setting up a two tier program at NASA. The front tier is the SLS/Orion where the work is the objective and the destination is irrelevant. The back tier (aka the “Shadow Tier” or “Deep State-Space”) are the partnerships with private industry to get crew to the moon. To prevent political schadenfreude these public/private partnerships will appear to be sub-projects partially (or majority) funded by NASA and operated by the private partners. In conjunction with that, make works will be applied to appear to make SLS useful (i.e. DSG, JWST, Europa?, etc.) some of which *may* be co-ordinate with the public/private ventures but may not. It doesn’t really matter…

Well well well. A goal of speeding up the pace of exploration is an excellent sign from NASA.

Is this the end of the time wasting silliness of moseying to Mars while ISS spins forever? Is this the end of the ‘kicking the can down the road’ non-policy of the prior administration?

I await two key decisions, to judge how serious the new NASA is. The first is a negative choice: will the new administrator have the wisdom and fortitude to pull the plug on SLS, sooner rather than later? The second choice is a positive step: months long life science variable gravity experiments, up to human participation.

Clearly the SLS Emperor is wearing no clothes. I hope it is only a matter of time before those in power admit it too. The question is how much time?

However if the SLS (and the ISS for that matter) truly is unkillable, that really does mean the end of NASA manned space exploration, doesn’t it? At best they will never get farther than the Moon in the next fifty years.

Maybe that would be a good thing if only private space expands beyond the Moon. But I hate to see such bottomless waste of taxpayer dollars. I want NASA to succeed.

The second choice is a positive step: months long life science variable gravity experiments, up to human participation.

This is really what any ISS replacement should be doing. Living in micro-gravity or even lunar gravity hasn’t been reported as an entirely pleasant experience. It could be that people will do tours on the lunar surface and then head to an artificial gravity station to recuperate, then back to the moon.

The proposed lunar COTS like missions are encouraging but they don’t look speedy. Maybe they are in comparison to the alternatives but not relative to other types of human endeavors.

The obvious problems with zero gee is why I can’t take the current NASA Mars mission architecture seriously. I mean really now, a solar-electric-propulsion Mars transfer vehicle with no artificial gravity? That might be fine for a cargo delivery tug, but not for manned flight. That’s a year or more a crew would have to endure in zero gee before arrival into orbit around Mars!

It’s clear to me the biggest open question we have today about flight beyond the moon, is the long term effects of lower gravity on human health. Until we know more and have adequate solutions, it is impossible to design an efficient manned Mars mission. What little we already know is that the human body can not cope with long term zero gee conditions.

I’m hoping that as little as 1/6 or 1/3 normal gravity will be enough to avoid the problems of zero gee conditions. But we need to find out as quickly as possible. That might mean a spinning space station in LEO, or maybe a Moon surface base.

* 3 minutes of fluff : Lewis & Clark -> Transcontinental Railroad in 66 years; Apollo -> Now 49 years.
* Time for our own railroad. “Like then, we need to enable public funds to support private equity and private bonds to deliver more commerce and more economic growth to solidify American leadership in space, science and discovery.
* Praised Griffin, Bolden, & Lightfoot for envisioning and advancing “commercialization of Low Earth Orbit, significantly lowering the cost and increasing the access to space.”
* “Their model can be extend to and around the Moon, and deeper into space, including Mars.”
* Yea InSight: InSight will help to understand the history of Mars, so we can better understand our planet.”
* Some of you young folks online might not remember that Mars used to have a vast ocean, covering two-thirds of its surface.
* InSight will help better understand risks to humans “should humans, when humans, get to Mars.”
* Don’t be concerned that our focus in the coming years is the moon. “… our exploration campaign will establish American leadership in the human exploration of Mars. We are doing both the Moon and Mars, in tandem, and the missions are supportive of each other.”
* “Our return to the surface of the Moon will allow us to improve and advance technologies which will feed forward to Mars: Precision landing systems, Methane engines, Orbital habitation, Surface habitation, Surface mobility, Long duration life support, Operations, and much more that will enable us to land the first Americans on the Red Planet.”
* Yea Mars 2020: Moxie, the ISRU demo (O2 from CO2). Sample return support.
* “We need a thriving LEO economy to can expand deeper into space, and we need a government backbone to explore where an economy doesn’t yet exist.”
* “We need the Space Launch System, and we need the Orion crew vehicle.”
* “We need a thriving industrial base and a worldwide coalition focused on this goal and sustaining it by inspiring the next generation.”
* Inspiring children.
* Back to Thomas Jefferson.

It’s at 7:15, only takes four seconds to say, and he doesn’t linger on it, though it does build from his preceding “… and we need a government backbone to explore where an economy doesn’t yet exist.”

When Mr. Bridenstine was sworn in, Rand wrote “I think he’ll be one of the best administrators NASA has had.”

Greatness requires both character and opportunity, and I don’t know that the opportunity is there now or will be there by 2020. If he gets an additional four years on the job, then he might be presented with a chance to challenge SLS & Orion, but for now, emphasizing a commercial, competitive role for lunar operations while giving lip service to SLS might be the best that can be reasonably hoped for.